BBC unravels presidential election rigging in Rivers State
Sopuruchi Onwuka
A report of how the February 25 presidential election was rigged showed that officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) subverted the will of Nigerian voters who trooped out to cause lawful change of government.
The investigation centered on Rivers State where the Governor, Nyesom Wike, had at a public speech after the election confessed that the hero of the exercise is Mr Peter Obi who flew the flag of the Labour Party in the presidential election.
According to the BBC report which sampled the election data from Rivers State and studied manipulation of the outcome that was published by INEC, massive numbers of votes were migrated from Labour Party to the All Progressive Congress (APC) in a collation process conducted by impersonators.
In the report “Nigeria election: The mystery of the altered results in disputed poll” published early today, BBC reported that its investigation “found evidence suggesting some results from Nigeria’s presidential election may have been manipulated.”
The official British news house declared that it “uncovered significant anomalies in Rivers state, a key battleground, although not sufficient to change the overall national outcome of the election, which took place in February.”
“There are also questions over the identity of an election official who read out some of the unexplained results,” BBC reported.
The Oracle Today reports that photo and video evidences of election result manipulation, ballot snatching, voter intimidation and use of security agencies in destroying already cast ballots were commonplace during the February elections.
Law enforcement agencies and INEC barred local media from announcing results and some news outlets have been sanctioned by government regulators for countering official position of INEC on the conduct o the elections.
Whereas local media are gagged from reporting outcome of elections, differing officials recruited by government in the conduct of the election had field day with brazen alteration of results some of which were captured by party agents using smart phones.
Some local INEC staff stated that the bimodal voter accreditation system and real time result upload vehemently promised by INEC were deliberately disabled to create room for manipulation.
In its investigative report, the BBC stated that “At each polling station, the votes for the party of each candidate were publicly announced and the results sheets taken for collation first at the ward level, then at local government (LGA) centres. An election official from each LGA then travelled to the state capital, where these results were officially declared.
“For the first time in a Nigerian election, photographs of the polling station results sheets were published online by the electoral commission. This made it possible to add up all the polling station sheets and to compare them with the results declared at the state level.”
In “What we found in Rivers state,” the BBC reported that “We added up the voting tally sheets from over 6,000 polling stations in Rivers state, where many of the opposition complaints had been made.
“While the official result in this state gave a clear majority to Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), our tally suggested that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had actually received most votes in the state by a wide margin.”
“We found an increase of just over 106,000 in Mr Tinubu’s vote in the official declaration when compared with our polling station tally – almost doubling his total in the state.
“In contrast, Mr Obi’s vote had fallen by over 50,000,” the BBC investigators reported.
They also reported that results were not even available for some of the 6,866 polling stations in Rivers state; adding that while some results “were incorrectly uploaded, others were missing, even after a month from the date of polling.”
“For about 5% of polling stations, the photos of tally sheets were too blurred for us to read. It’s reasonable to assume that the official count would have included these as they would have had the original documents.
“In another 17%, there were no results at all. Many of these would have been places where no voting took place due to security issues or the non-arrival of voting materials. Others had technical problems preventing officials uploading the documents.
“So there clearly would have been more polling stations included in the final official results that weren’t included in the BBC investigation.
“However, these additional tally sheets would have increased the totals for each party, not decreased them. And what we found was that the votes for Peter Obi’s Labour Party had decreased sharply in Rivers state.”
In analyzing the sharp fall in votes for Peter Obi in the official result, the investigators point at two areas.
“The first was the Oyigbo local government area, where we found: the vote for Bola Tinubu was six times larger in the officially announced results compared with the BBC’s polling station count
“Peter Obi’s votes had been cut in half,” the BBC reported.
“The second local government area where we found major discrepancies was in nearby Obio/Akpor: The official result for Mr Tinubu was 80,239 votes, but we counted just 17,293 votes from polling station tallies.
“The count for Mr Obi was announced officially as just 3,829 votes, but the BBC counted 74,033 votes for him on the tally sheets,” the BBC added.
The BBC report stated that the results read out at the State collation center by Oyigbo election official, Dr Dickson Ariaga, of Federal College of Education in Omoku on February 27 altered the results for APC and LP.
“They all matched those on the collation sheet the BBC had obtained. But when he reached Mr Tinubu’s APC, instead of saying 2,731 as written on our photograph of the sheet, he read out “16,630”.
“Then for Mr Obi’s party (LP) the figure changed again – instead of the 22,289 seen on the sheet, he announced “10,784”, more than halving his vote.”
The report by the BBC also discovered that some INEC officials announcing the fake results could have been impersonators recruited by INEC for the same purpose.
“We asked the electoral commission if we could speak to Dr Ariaga, but they would not give us his details or reach out to him for us.
“We spoke to the election official seated next to Dr Ariaga, but she told us she wasn’t authorised to talk to the press.
“So we sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where he’d said he worked when introducing himself,” the investigators reported.
The Deputy Provost Moses Ekpa told the BBC: “From our records, both from our payroll and from our human resources, there is no such a name in our system and we don’t know such a person.”
Moses Ekpa says the Federal College of Education in Omoku has never heard of Dr Ariaga
We tried tracking him down on social media and eventually came across another Facebook account for someone in Port Harcourt, whose profile details had the name Dickson Ariaga.
“When we compared an image from this account to the television pictures of Dr Ariaga using Amazon Rekognition software, we achieved a match of 97.2%, indicating a very high probability they’re the same man.
“Dr Ariaga did not respond to messages sent by us to this account.
“By reaching out to his Facebook friends we did finally manage to speak to a man who said he was a relative, who was at first willing to help us but then didn’t return our calls.”
Johnson Sinikiem, Inec’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, told us that due to a “gross shortage of time and personnel” they had needed to take on some people without verifying their identity documents, the BC reported.
Referring to Dr Ariaga, he said: “If he had presented himself as a lecturer from [the college in Omoku] and it’s otherwise, then he is dishonest.”
“We also approached Inec’s headquarters in Abuja for a response to our findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers state. We were told that they were unable to comment due to ongoing legal challenges.
“This is just one case in one state in southern Nigeria where the evidence points to the results having been manipulated,” the BBC reported.
The Oracle Today reports that the 2023 general elections in Nigeria has been huge global let down. The conduct and outcomes of the election have been condemned by all observer missions that come to Nigeria, including the European Commission, the African Union, the ECOWAS and many more international observer groups.
In their separate reports, all the observer missions condemned aggressive use of security agencies to suppress opposition supporters; massive deployment of official powers by the incumbent, sponsorship of violence on non-indigenous voters and manipulation of results.
